


A Pilgrim and a Preacher

by DratTheRat



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cuthbert Lives, Angst, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hopeful Ending, POV Female Character, POV Minor Character, Scars, Smut, Storytelling, Threesome - F/M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-21 22:35:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13750605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DratTheRat/pseuds/DratTheRat
Summary: “Do you think that is a happy ending?” Roland asked at last.“The world has moved on,” Alice reminded him, “I think that is as happy as it gets.”Everybody deserves better.





	1. Day One

_He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars . . ._

_. . . He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction_

\- Kris Kristofferson, "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33"

It had been less than a month since Nort was touched by God when Alice saw the next batch of strangers roll into town. That made three strangers in all - a crowd, for the rotting, isolated town of Tull. The carriages that passed the tavern were scarce these days and mostly empty when they came, and the travellers - almost all of them traders from the dwellings on the desert edge or pathetic, dried up towns in the opposite direction - were scarcely ever strangers from afar.

The next two men arrived on foot but, drawn and dusty though they were, they did not look rundown enough to have walked from whence they came - they’d boarded some steed or other with Kennerly, the grasping rat, she was sure of it. Both men were tall and slender, but one was taller, so the other, slighter man, who followed close behind his shoulder, seemed like he was his shadow. The other patrons eyed them and their guns with speculative disgust, and the slighter shadow man grinned them into submission. His once handsome face bore the mark of their cruel profession: a black leather patch pointed out where his right eye was missing. His other eye was dark, black in the shadow of his hat and the shadow of the dimly lit room. The tall man’s eyes were piercing blue, his visage sharp. He reminded her strongly of the God-man, Walter, and her body warmed with arousal in spite of the warning in her brain.

The tall man ordered burgers and paid gold, and Alice snapped at him about the lack of change and didn’t give him any bread. She cooked four patties and watched with fabricated apathy as the tall man devoured three, the slight man only one. The other patrons glowered jealously but let them be, not fools enough to mess with two armed men. When they were nearly finished, Nort approached. The harmless dope had let his insides be devoured by the poison of addictive devil grass until he had collapsed; and yet, he was no longer dead - the last stranger had seen to that. He opened his black and slimy maw and addressed them in a language she had never heard before. Sheb, the small and hunched piano man who tried and failed to fulfill her needs, screeched pitifully and departed. All her patrons fled.

The slight man murmured something to his friend in the same language Nort had used. His expression was grim at first, but his second sentence ended in a smile. It occurred to Alice that he was disgustingly handsome, still, in spite of the hole in his face, and she cursed her capricious groin for wanting them both. Even scarred himself, a man who looked like that would never gaze upon a woman like Alice with tenderness or even lust - not now that she had been defaced. Once, she had been pretty, and she did her best with powder, but no amount of makeup could hide the shameful scar that tracked across her forehead. 

The tall man gently pushed his friend away and spoke. He pressed her about Nort, about the man who made him live again. 

She eyed him speculatively. Perhaps he had been handsome in his youth - in a harsh, angular way - but now he was all grit. He wore the weather on his face, and his bright, blue eyes sat, incongruously beautiful, in the center of a storm that would never see a fairer day again. Striking, yes, they were both striking, but from this one conventional beauty had been worn away. “I guess maybe you know my price,” she tried, “I got an itch I used to be able to take care of, but now I can’t.”

He eyed her up and down, and she regretted her words immediately and covered up her face. The slighter man, she noticed through her tears, hardly looked at her at all. His dark eye flitted to her scarred and tearful face before returning to his friend.

“For fuck’s sake, Roland,” he said at last, speaking in her tongue for the first time, “Tell the lady yea or nea and put her out of her misery. We’re none of us what we once were, and nobody desires to be stared at.”

The tall man (Roland) jarred himself from his scrutiny of Alice’s imperfect form. “Go back and tell that to yourself at seventeen,” he muttered to his friend, who laughed. “I cry your pardon,” he said almost mechanically to Alice, “I accept your price. Put out the lights.”

She did, and the slight man watched her from the bar until darkness engulfed him and she could no longer distinguish his eyepatch from the remnants of his handsome face. Nervously, she thought back to her initial impression that he was the tall man’s shadow, but he did not follow them upstairs.

She led the tall man (Roland) into her small three room apartment, locked the door, and took him to her bedroom without lighting any lamps. She stripped and laid out on the bed in darkness so he could not see her scar, and he joined her when he was naked, too. His lovemaking was silent and perfunctory but satisfying; Alice could tell that he was not the kind of man who left a job half done. 

Afterwards, he rolled off of her and made them each a cigarette. Again, he pressed her about Nort. 

Reluctantly, she told him about the old addict's pathetic death and disgusting resurrection at the hands of the strange, priest-like man in black. She told him of the note she had received: if she should tell her desiccated and repellent undead erstwhile friend, “NINETEEN,” then he would share the secrets that he saw beyond the grave. The letter promised it would drive her mad. She begged the tall man in her bed to stay.

“We’ll see,” he said. Then he rolled over her again and took her for a second time. 

She was wetter than before and more than ready to take him into her again. He was not a youthful man, and she was surprised by his vigor - there was more life in him now he’d heard her tale of the man he seemed to seek. She guessed from his renewed arousal that he had not bedded anyone in quite some time, though she had suspected things at first about the man downstairs. She imagined them together anyway, and the picture stoked her own desire: her Roland, all grit, blue eyes, and stormy weather tangled with the slighter shadow man, whose pretty, smiling lips stretched wide as he devoured his master's essence. She came easily and more than once, and this time Roland grunted softly when he spilled inside her. He smoked another cigarette and slept beside her, though he did not hold her in his arms. Alice’s sleep was fitful - she rarely let Sheb stay the night and was not used to sharing sleeping space - but she prayed to every deity she knew, even the detested man in black, that he would stay awhile.


	2. Day Two

In the morning, Alice came downstairs the find the barroom properly shuttered. Nort was gone, and Roland’s friend was laid out, sleeping, on a long bench by the wall. His pale, wide brimmed hat hung from the ear of a nearby chair, and his oilskin duster was pulled up to his nose. Roland stomped conspicuously in his direction, and his friend, motionless except for his arm and hand, pointed a gun at him without looking. He cocked it slowly.

“You are a grown man, Cuthbert, and not a young one, either. Must I still chastise you not to point your weapon at a friend?” Roland’s reprimand was harsh, and Alice listened in vain for fondness in his voice.

The slight man lowered his gun and uncocked it. “Your censure carries little weight when you have slept sweet in a bed and I have tossed and turned on this hard bench all night. I was asleep for the first or maybe second time when you came clomping in here like a lumbering plow horse. Leave me be or answer to the consequences.” He raised the gun again.

Roland caught his wrist and massaged it gently until his partner (Cuthbert) loosened his grip on his weapon and let it dangle from a finger. There was affection in the gesture even if it had been absent from his voice. “There’s food,” he promised, and Alice tore her attention from the two men and began to putter in her kitchen, heating water up for grits.

“There better be,” Cuthbert muttered. He rose and sat with Roland at the bar. 

Alice watched them talk together as she boiled meal into grits: a serving for herself, three for Roland, and one more for his friend. Roland spoke steadily as he recounted what she’d told him of the man in black, and Cuthbert leaned his cheek upon his palm and listened. Alice was surprised and pleased to find that she no longer found the slighter man more handsome than his friend, as she had the night before. His bone structure was finer, sure, but his complexion was bland in comparison with Roland, who drew her lustful eye more and more with his tanned skin, piercing blue eyes, and jet black hair with just a hint of gray. In contrast, in the light of day, the slighter Cuthbert’s coal black eye revealed itself as brown, and, now that he was hatless, she saw he had the hair to match. His skin was weathered, too, as weathered as his friend’s, and the combination of his dark brown eye and hair and tanned and wind dried skin made her think of wooden, sand blown signposts like the one outside of town. He had weathered his life’s journey better than the signpost had, say true, and still showed signs of being better made, but the superficial remnants of his beauty did not hold the same appeal as Roland’s starker coloring, his height, his authoritative air, the proven competence of his pleasingly hard cock.

Alice served their grits in silence and received a smile of thanks from Cuthbert, who began to eat at once, and no word at all from Roland, who recounted the story to its end before sparing even a glance at his rapidly cooling meal. She leaned back against the wall behind the bar and ate her own portion, watching them consume her food in silence.

“There’s a chaise upstairs,” she offered at last, “if you will both stay here awhile.” She knew she had to keep the slight man happy if she wanted Roland in her bed.

Cuthbert finished up his grits and looked at her, his dark eye hard. “My thanks,” he said and sounded genuine enough, “but . . .”

“You have not told me what you thought,” Roland interrupted, “Is Cuthbert Allgood at a loss for words? I thought that day would never come.”

Cuthbert sighed and turned back toward his friend. He pursed his lips and sucked in his already hollow cheeks, further emphasizing the sharpness of his finely chiseled cheekbones. He opened up his mouth to speak and held it for a moment in the wide shape of the word, “I,” before he closed and rounded his lips slightly and uttered, “that,” instead. 

“That day has come and gone,” he said, “and more than once, as you well know, but I am at no loss for words today. I did not speak before because I was eating, and because you already know what I will say, and because you know I know you know you will not like it.” He smiled briefly to himself, appreciating his speech. A cocky man, Alice judged, too clever for his own good. As a pretty youth he must have been insufferably vain. He continued: “But I have cleaned my bowl, and you have pressed me, so I will tell you anyway - I like this not at all. What good will come to you or me if we should catch this man? And yet, it’s worse if we stay here. He’s set a trap for you, of course, just as he set a trap for her. He’s led you to a place where undead dotards taunt you with the High Speech and willing women tempt you into restful domesticity on the precipice of death and madness. And that is just the stuff we know! What else might he have in mind for you before you leave this cursed town? Do you not think he means to break you bit by bit before you meet him in the flesh?”

Roland turned to Alice. “Our Cuthbert’s quite the speechifier, is he not?” 

She took a breath to answer him with something she hoped he might find clever - a remark about a courtly speech to go with an absurdly courtly name - but Roland was ignoring her already and speaking to his friend.

“You have told me almost nothing I did not already know.”

“So I warned before I started. It was you who wanted me to waste my breath.”

“I noticed one thing that I did not like.”

“What, only one?” Cuthbert teased darkly, a crooked smile on his lips.

“You speak of traps for me and only me - but what of you?”

The narrow, bony shoulders shrugged. “I am incidental.” Cuthbert twirled his empty spoon around his delicate looking fingers.

“You are not!” Roland slammed his fist down on the bar top, and his own spoon clanked against the side of his half empty bowl. Alice flinched sharply.

Cuthbert raised his only visible eyebrow. “I am incidental,” he repeated, “beneath his consideration - that is my greatest hope. If not, I am a trap for you, myself.”

“You are not,” Roland said again, this time so softly Alice had to strain to hear. “I chose to have you with me. I very nearly . . .”

Cuthbert laid his hand atop that of his friend. “I know. I do not fault you for it.”

“Even alive, I could have left you many times. At the farm with Rose Marie and her daughter. Warm and safe in loving Ruby’s bed.”

“You tried that, don’t forget.”

“Never. That was a mistake.” He turned his hand over and squeezed his friend’s even more slender fingers in his own.

Cuthbert nodded gravely. “It might have been mine.”

Roland shook his head. “If he does think of you, he’ll think my love for my childhood companion makes me weak.”

“He may be right. Others have said as much before. You father . . .” 

Roland shook his head again, and Cuthbert trailed off. “Love is not a thing he understands.”

Alice felt very small. She tried to shrink into invisibility. She nearly regretted remaining there to hear their private conversation. But not quite. She might be no great beauty anymore, but she had things to offer Roland that his friend did not, however much more love he clearly had for him. A small kernel of self worth returned, and she smiled slightly, hoping, if they noticed, they would think it was the product of their soppy conversation. Wetness leaked onto her inner thigh.

Now Cuthbert was the one shaking his head. His crooked smile had returned. “Do you mean your father, or . . .”

Roland growled and shoved his friend’s hand away, grimacing at what was surely an extremely inappropriate joke. He talked loudly over Cuthbert’s boyish laugh. “You do not want to go. You do not want to stay. What is it that you want, then?”

Cuthbert grinned. “I want the rest of your grits. You’ll turn your stomach if you finish such a portion after gorging yourself so last night.”

Roland seemed to almost smile. “Then you shall have your wish.” He gestured grandly and slid his bowl of unfinished, lukewarm mush across the bar until it clinked with Cuthbert’s empty one.

Alice smiled more broadly. The men had settled nothing. They would stay another day at least.

***

After breakfast, Alice took them both upstairs, and Cuthbert made his meager camp around the ratty lounger in her faded sitting room. She brought him water in a dented steel basin, and Roland fucked her in the daylight while he shaved. The walls between the rooms were thin, and neither she nor Roland was surprised to find him absent by the time they finished and were dressed.

By late afternoon it was Roland who was gone, and Cuthbert had returned. He paid more gold for another burger - she gave him bread this time - and lurked stilly in the shadows watching people come and go and listening to Sheb jangle the keys. To the other patrons he seemed to be invisible, but Alice knew each man and woman was in danger while he sat and watched them revel stupidly about with only one hand ever showing at a time. She pictured Roland wandering the dreary streets of Tull, his long body casting no shadow in the low sun’s waning light. She shuddered and snuck herself a swallow of Star whiskey - the best liquor she had. She was sure that Cuthbert saw.

It was nearly dark when Roland strode in through the batwing doors, and the drunken, reeling customers all turned to look and scowl. Sheb tried to scowl as well, but his glare turned quickly to a pout, and he cast his drooping, bovine eyes on Alice. She shook her head minutely and spared him what she imagined was an apologetic and sympathetic glance before primping slightly and standing up straight so her breasts pushed satisfyingly against the fabric of her bland and frazzled dress. She fed him and, under Cuthbert’s shadowy scrutiny, poured him some of the good whiskey. He offered something like a smile and nursed his drink contemplatively until Cuthbert, silent as a ghost, appeared beside him and swallowed what was left in one unflinching gulp.

“Tell me more about the church,” he said to Alice.

“More? I've told you nothing yet.” Alice was in no mood to help.

He smiled. “Say true. I saw the church, and it was empty. I spoke with people about this and that. They told me to go fuck myself. They asked me which of us was fucking you, or whether you were servicing us both.”

She flinched. Knowing how she was regarded in the town did not mean she liked to be told.

Roland raised an eyebrow. “Bert,” he warned.

But Cuthbert only smiled at him. “I’ll reckon your experience was much the same.”

Roland nodded and said nothing. He looked at Alice, and his friend did, too. Both men’s eyes were so, so hard. Coal and ice. Coal could burn and ice could melt, but not for her. She clenched her teeth, determined not to cry in front of them again.

“The people here don’t like us,” Cuthbert said, “and they’ve no respect for you. Tell me about their church.”

Alice took a shuddering breath. “I don’t go,” she admitted, confirming his suspicions, “The woman who preaches has poison religion.”

“Tell me,” Cuthbert said.

“I don’t go!” she repeated, irritated. “It’s all hellfire and horseshit. She looks a bit like you,” she added maliciously, “If you were three or four times your size. Big brown eyes and hair to match. Do you miss your mother?”

He grinned nastily and leaned across the bar. “My mother died screaming,” he whispered in her ear.

She flinched away, but he was already back in his seat wearing a thin lipped, fake smile.

“Which direction did she come from?” Roland picked up where his friend left off. “Toward the desert?”

“Yes,” she spat.

He nodded. “Thank you. When can we retire?”

“Now,” she said with emphasis. “Sheb can close us up, or he can,” she jerked her head towards Cuthbert, “if he wants to use his . . . speechifying to make me feel like shit." 

She marched upstairs and did not look back. Again, he took her in the dark. She cried out when she came and hoped that they could hear downstairs.

“They cut at her until she died to make his father suffer. Mayhap they hoped they’d root him out and cut at him to get at me. He chose to live and fight another day. He wept. Cuthbert misses his mother very much.” He says this as a whisper in the darkness, his arm pressed up against her side.

“He should not have hurt me first. Thinks he’s so fucking clever.”

“He is cleverer than I am. Too clever for his own good, say perhaps. He is a killer. So am I. You could have told him straight when first he asked.”

Alice keened a plaintive sigh. “I don’t want you to go to her,” she whined, “I don’t want you to go.”

“I know.”

They lay in silence for a moment. Alice could hear Sheb’s piano jangling downstairs. “Do you miss your mother, too?” she asked at last.

“Yes.”

“Was she murdered?”

“Yes.”

“To hurt you?” 

“In a way,” he hedged.

“What the fuck does that mean?” she turned on him, sick of riddles.

“I shot her. I mistook her for someone else. There was sorcery involved.”

“That man you’re following, the one who brought Nort back?”

“No. Maybe.”

“Does it haunt you?”

Roland did not answer the question directly. “He looks like her,” he said instead, “Slim and delicate and comely. Big brown eyes. Sometimes I’m almost glad he lost one in case I could not bear to see her in his face. But then I think of something worse.”

Alice considered. Two men walk into a bar - one is the other’s shadow. They are so similar in build, their hands so long and slim, their guns like she has never seen strapped to their hips. Of course they are related, more closely than is healthy, maybe - bred to be the way they are. A deadly twist on the nobility of old? They both have rather courtly names, though Cuthbert’s seems more frivolous. Sorcery. High drama. Murder carefully executed, not sudden, needless, stupid. An old fable unfolded dustily inside her tired mind: Once there was a city surrounded by high walls . . . Once there was a Captain who so loved his Lieutenant . . . As a worldly woman she had put such romantic nonsense out of her head.

“What you said this morning,” she murmured, thinking out loud, “You almost killed him once.”

“I almost sent him to his death, which is the same.”

“It’s not,” she said. Once there was a Lieutenant who so loved his Captain that he was always ready to die . . .


	3. Day Three

The next day was an echo of the one before. At some point in the night Cuthbert must have made his bed upon the chaise because there he was when she and Roland left the bedroom, clean shaven and just refastening his eyepatch. Alice was not sorry to have missed seeing what lay beneath. She nodded at him and forced out a smile: truce. He smiled back, sweetly and without compunction. It startled her, and she stumbled back against Roland’s solid chest.

“When I was young I loved a girl and she loved me,” he whispered in her ear, “She’d met him many times before, but then he smiled at her like that, and she wondered what she would have done if she had met him first. There are lots of little things I hate him for.” 

Cuthbert watched them, and his smile twisted wry. Had he heard or read Roland’s lips or guessed his gist from his expression? Alice shook her head against his body; Roland was so tall the top of her head did not even reach his chin. He had sounded like he meant it. 

“But love is stronger, right?” she spoke out loud, “That’s what the story says. Your story. ‘Once There was a Captain.’”

Cuthbert looked from her to Roland standing tall behind her. “Why, Roland, we are famous!” he cried, smiling more fully again but not nearly so sweet. 

Roland grunted. Alice felt the deep sound vibrate in his chest.

“Grits again?” Cuthbert asked pleasantly, “I'll start them. You'll have to hurry and take over, though, before they go to ruin.” He stepped lightly out the door and down the stairs.

“He jests,” Roland affirmed, “His cooking has improved greatly since our youth. Once he took a lover just because she made good pastry crust and let him try his hand at it.”

“Just?” Alice mused, “Does he? Jest, I mean. You're the one who's hurt him now.” She turned around to look at him.

He let her look into his eyes, but there was nothing there to see. 

Disturbed and yet aroused, determined to squeeze every pleasurable moment out of him she could, she dropped down to her knees and reached into his trousers. He was soft but hardened quickly in her hands and then her mouth. She worked a hand between her legs and spread the growing wetness there around before shoving two then three fingers inside herself to make sure she was ready. Then she let him drop out of her mouth and stood abruptly, bending herself forward over the raised back of the chaise with her skirt over her head. He followed and shoved his spit slicked cock inside her from behind, just the way she wanted. The angle was exquisite. 

As he pulled her back against his hips, she moaned into the oilskin duster Cuthbert had left draped over the back of the lounger when he went downstairs in his shirtsleeves. She fancied she could smell him on it, but, in reality, she guessed there was no way his man-sweat could have permeated any garment so thoroughly oiled that it had kept its soft and sticky texture all the way across the unforgiving, windblown hardpan that ran from Pricetown into Tull until it reached the brutal desert sands beyond. She inhaled the scent of the leather and thought about him anyway. 

She leaned further forward, putting her weight on the furniture and almost lifting her feet off the floor. The angle was even better now. “Fuck, Roland, yes!” she muffled into Cuthbert’s coat. She came, and he came, too.

By the time they went downstairs, Cuthbert had departed. He had left his dirty dishes on the counter and a covered pot of grits upon the stove. The breakfast was not burned.

***

As he had on the previous day, Cuthbert returned in the afternoon while Roland was still out. Alice smiled at him when he came in and went to make his burger before he had the opportunity to pay for it. He gave her a smile in return - the sweet one - when she served it to him, but he retreated with it to a shadowy table as he had the day before. She wondered if he and Roland met and talked without her when they were in town.

Few patrons were in the bar this time of day, but Cuthbert sat and watched the ones there were with obvious distaste. The local sots ignored him and crowded around Sheb, who knocked out clumsy ragtime on the old piano. 

After a while, Nort came in and stumbled straight for Cuthbert. Alice’s hands tensed and nearly cracked the glass she had been cleaning. Nort had long been a pathetic and disgusting addict, and Alice shrunk from his company now that the man in black had planted NINETEEN in her head, but he was still a friend - simple, mostly harmless, never cruel. She held her breath as Nort fell clumsily into a chair beside the gunslinger, but Cuthbert only turned his head and smiled amiably at him. They fell into a conversation. It struck her suddenly that Cuthbert seemed, at heart, a rather friendly man, and it might be in his nature to smile kindly at a genial old coot like Nort, who had rotted in his body instead of his brain. The world had moved on, and what was left was hard as the packed, infertile soil on which Tull had been built. She shamed herself for letting her self pity drag her down onto the level of the detested, pious hypocrites who haunted the bleak and dying border town in which she’d lived for years. It had not occurred to her to greet strange men with kindness.

Curious, she stepped out from behind the bar and edged her way across the room, hoping to catch what they were talking about. Would Nort speak once again in the strange language in which he had addressed the strangers once before? 

She did not get to find out. The moment she crept in to Sheb’s line of sight, the piano player changed his tune to “Careless Love.” Cuthbert looked up at them abruptly, Nort’s company forgotten, kindness missing from his single eye.

“It was only for you, Allie! It was you first and it was all for you.” Sheb reeled at her wretchedly, grasping for her skirt as his left hand played the changes for the missing melody. “. . . wrecked this life of mine,” he howled unmelodically before Alice succeeded in pulling away, and he returned his right hand to the dingy keyboard and began the second verse in rag, thankfully without more singing.

Alice had no words for him. “Don’t make yourself a worse fool, Sheb,” she told him anyway and slunk back to the bar.

When she looked across the room again, Nort was hunched alone at Cuthbert’s shadowed table, but the gunslinger had moved. He was sitting closer to the piano and within Sheb’s line of sight, and the sullen barflies had adjusted to give him a wide berth. They spread out from him in a distant semicircle, as though he were the center of an explosive blast. Perhaps he was about to be. Sheb seemed oblivious, hunched, sniffling, over his piano keys, pouring his apparently broken heart into the dreary love song.

“Stop that racket now, you worm,” Cuthbert commanded. His voice rang clear across the bar, and several of the patrons fled. 

Sheb continued on, defiant. “What,” he blubbered, “do you want something cheery, stranger? Fuck no. You came here with him that stole my sweet, sweet love away.”

Cuthbert scoffed. “‘Stranger,’ do you call me? We’ve met before, Sheb, you and I. I reckon you’ll remember if you think on it long enough. I reckon you should stop playing and think.”

This took Sheb by surprise, and his hands slowed and eventually stopped, the music fading sparsely into silence like the tinkle of a music box whose spring is all wound out. Alice could see his simple mind run through a catalogue of one-eyed men and come up short. 

“Nar,” muttered Sheb, “I would remember you.”

“Think harder, Sheb,” Cuthbert spat the name like it was dirt to him. He paused and then continued, his voice lilting musically, “I’d two eyes when you saw me last - in Mejis by the sea. A girl who burned on Reap Night . . .”

“Oh yes!” Sheb interrupted, giggling. “She burned so bright and screamed for him.” He smiled in fond remembrance.

Alice gasped, horrified. Sheb was weak and useless on his own, but it was easy now to imagine his cringing disposition incensed and delighted by the power of a mob. A mob was waiting here, she realized, to drive the strangers from the town. And she had made herself their ally.

Cuthbert’s eye smoldered. Coal fire, just like she’d thought. “Wrong answer.” He reached below his waist and set something on the table. It was not a gun, as Alice had expected, but something lighter, smooth and wooden. He must have worn it on his belt - the extra one he wore that did not hold a gun and didn’t hold his trousers up. She’d noticed a long dagger in a sheath, a leather pouch, probaby for money, though she could not recall whether she had seen him draw a coin from it, and a dark, well lacquered horn, but the object he presented now had slipped her mind. It was a simple slingshot.

The effect on Sheb was incredible. He moaned and held his head in both his hands. “Oh God! You’re one of them three boys!” Then, in what might have been soft headed bravado or dimwitted curiosity, he added, “Where’s the third?”

Unlike Roland, Cuthbert seemed to have a well developed sense of humor, and Alice saw his lips quirk into an involuntary smirk of genuine amusement at the foolish taunt. His smirk was no less terrifying than his glower. “Would you like to see him?” he asked. He reached down again, and this time he drew one of his guns. He set that on the table, too.

Sheb blanched and cowered, shaking his head.

“You can be thankful that my friend has been distracted and you have escaped his notice, but I can’t stand your presence anymore. Begone! Skidaddle, insect, or I’ll take your eyes before I send you with a message for Alain Johns - Richard Stockworth as you heard him called, Richard of Gilead.”

Sheb froze, too terrified now even to flee. Cuthbert drew something tiny from the leather pouch and tossed it high into the air. As it fell back toward his hand, Alice saw that it was a little metal ball. She could feel his strong temptation to carry out his threat. He set the ball against the sling and drew it taut.

“Do you doubt my aim? You shouldn’t. I’ve had ample practice since I left my eye behind.” He gave the snivelling man one final prod: “I’ll send you with a message for Susan Delgado as well,” he mused, “Roland isn’t here just now, but I reckon I can guess his gist . . .”

Sheb squeaked and ran, tumbling clumsily through the batwings and crumpling face first into the street. Cuthbert raked his fiery gaze across the few remaining drunks. They stumbled from their chairs and followed. He put away his slingshot and his gun and looked at Alice from across the bar. She poured him a Star whiskey.

Cuthbert smiled a wry smile. He ambled to the bar and sat across from her and drank. 

“He hates me because the girl who loved him faithfully once looked on me and saw something she liked,” he volunteered, “He hates me, too, because, just hours before, I forgave him for a terrible mistake. He hates that I resemble his mother, for whom his feelings were . . . complex.” He laughed darkly into his whiskey and drained the last of it. She filled it up again. “Have one yourself,” he said. She did. “He hates that, as I grew into a man, I left behind the customs I held sacred as a boy. Not all of them of course, but . . .” he shrugged. He drained his drink again and spread his palm over the top of the glass. He looked her in the eye. “These things are nothing now. What friend or brother does not feel a little hate for those who have wormed closest to his heart? But, when I fall, they’ll weave a heavy cord of guilt for him to wear because we were not perfect. Is love stronger, or is it a noose around his neck?”

Alice shook her head. “Try not to die,” she suggested.

He laughed with sudden merriment. “You watch yourself,” he said, grinning, “for we are harbingers of death, especially for blondes. You should not pray to God or anyone that we will stay.” He placed two gold pieces on the bar. “For the loss of patronage and the good stuff. I’m very tired, Allie. Roland will be here soon.” He combed his slender fingers through her hair and slipped up the stairs into the growing dark.

Roland appeared soon after. Already Alice had shuttered up the windows and doused the few lit lamps. Once he was inside she shuttered up the doorway, too, and took him up to bed. In her rapidly darkening apartment, she glimpsed Cuthbert lying on the lounger, his duster wrapped around his slight and bony form. They tiptoed past him, and she stripped and lay down, naked on her bed. Roland stripped down, also, and crawled purposefully astride her. She began moaning before he even pushed inside.

After, she immediately wanted him again. 

“Wait a while,” he promised.

They smoked.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said again. This time she did not whine.

“I don’t know what I want,” he told her.

“I want a happy ending,” she admitted, “When I was young and beautiful, I used to think I’d fall in love. I thought that I was fair enough to inspire more than lust. I’d find a man who’d fill me up with pure true love: like the Captain and the Lieutenant. Then the world sucked me dry, and I forgot.”

“What was their story?”

She laughed at him. “As if you do not know.”

“Tell me.”

“Alright, but don’t laugh.” She recited: “Once there was a Captain who so loved his Lieutenant that he stopped the hand of death and plucked him from his grave. They grew up in a city with high walls, and their love was steady even as the world moved on. When they came to their last stand, and all their friends were dead, the Captain saw the day was lost. Against everything he had been taught, he abandoned the battle to save his dying friend. The Lieutenant, who so loved his Captain that he was always ready to die, was so surprised to be plucked from the grave that part of his soul was trapped in the world after death. The Captain took him to a magic spring, but the water did not heal his wounds. He took him to a fairy forest, but the fairies could not help. At last, on the edge of the forest, he met an ordinary little girl, who led them to a friendly house in a country infested with their enemies. Her mother was a farmer and, since her husband was long gone, she was both a butcher and a seamstress. 

“‘I can save your Lieutenant,’ she told the Captain, ‘But only if you let me cut out a piece of your soul and sew it up inside him.’ 

“‘That is easy,’ said the Captain, and he cut out the piece of soul himself and handed it to the farmer woman to sew into his friend, for he was a master butcher but did not sew very well. 

“When she had finished, the Lieutenant was no longer drawn toward the world after death. His wounds healed, and he was complete. The Captain was complete as well, for his soul was always with him in the shape of his Lieutenant. They said farewell to the farmer and her daughter and journeyed on together, hand in hand.”

Roland was silent.

Alice waited for a while, then she spoke again. “At first, I used to dream that I was the Lieutenant, that somebody would love me so much that he’d pluck me from the grave and give me a piece of his soul. Then, I wished I was the Captain, that my love could save somebody who would stay with me forever. But I realized the flaw in that wish soon enough. What if the Lieutenant were killed a second time? Then the part of the Captain’s soul would be trapped in the world after death. I thought he didn’t think it through.”

Roland grunted but said nothing. 

“That wouldn’t happen, though. I know that now. On his deathbed, the Lieutenant would cut the piece of soul back out and give it to his Captain to save him in return, and he would still have the Lieutenant with him after that because part of his soul had lived inside him for a while.”

“Do you think that is a happy ending?” Roland asked at last.

“The world has moved on,” Alice reminded him, “I think that is as happy as it gets.”

Roland rolled on top of her again and set his long, slim hand against her scarred, already sagging face. He kissed her deeply and rolled over, pulling her on top of him. He ran his hands along her sides and over her dangling breasts and then impaled her from below, tugging her down so hard upon his cock that she threw her head back and cried out in pleasure and surprise. She guessed the noise woke Cuthbert, if he had ever been asleep at all, and wondered whether the sounds of their lovemaking bothered him. In her mind, his fine boned hand coaxed his body to completion underneath his oilskin coat. She remembered the smell of it.


	4. Day Four

The next day they all breakfasted together. Alice opened up the bar, but only Nort came in. Cuthbert drifted out into the town, and Alice took Roland back to bed.

In the afternoon, Roland went out, and Cuthbert wandered back. He said hello to Nort and cooked his own burger. Alice didn’t try to stop him.

“One for me, too,” she said and sat on the customers’ side of the bar. 

Cuthbert smiled and cooked her lunch. They ate in silence. Dusk approached. Before Roland appeared, Alice scooped a hunk of meat out of her ice box and smashed it down upon the stove. 

“Another one for me, please,” Cuthbert asked.

“He eats less and less since you’ve been here, and you eat more and more,” she commented, wondering whether they could really share a piece of soul between them. Of course that was only a fable. And yet, Roland had spoken of sorcery, and she had seen a dead man brought to life, so anything was possible. 

Cuthbert shrugged. “That’s how it is.”

She threw another burger on the stove and walked back to the bar, standing as close to him as she could get with the wooden countertop between them. 

“The sabbath is tomorrow,” she whispered, looking up at him. With how Roland towered over everyone she had forgotten he was also tall.

He nodded. “Thank you, Alice.”

She decided that she did not mind being the lady farmer, or maybe the little girl, waving at the Captain and Lieutenant as they walked slowly away, as long as she was part of the story.

When Roland came in, Cuthbert mentioned nothing about the sabbath or the church. They ate their burgers, and Roland and Alice went upstairs together.

***

It was much later, and they were naked and ready to make love for a second time, when Cuthbert came in without knocking. He did it so silently that Alice did not notice until Roland, who had been ready to plunge into her again, paused suddenly and pursed his lips, his nostrils flaring. His bright blue eyes shot towards the bedroom door.

“What blood have you shed?” he demanded. Unashamed of his still proud cock, he sat back on his haunches, making no effort to shield her naked body from his friend.

Alice shrank back against the headboard and gathered the blankets up over her breasts. It was her surprise, she knew, and not false modesty that had driven her to cover up, and she regretted her instinctual reaction. Her vaginal muscles clenched angrily at nothing, chasing uselessly after the pleasure she had been denied. Cuthbert might have had an eyeful when Roland first pulled back had he been facing them straight on, but he was angled to his left, his sightless, patched right eye hole pointed toward the center of the room. She almost laughed at this remnant of what must have once been courtly manners; he was a murderer, and he had come into the bedroom without warning, knowing full well what they were likely to be up to. Then she remembered she had once thought him kind and slumped back silently in resignation. She was, she realized, glad the fateful conversation the would drive them from her town would take place here in front of her.

Cuthbert closed the bedroom door and leaned against it. He gave her a curt nod and said, “I cry your pardon. Doubly. We must leave by morning.” 

No lamp was lit, but the shutters were still open, and the moon was large. In the dim and shutter-banded light, the dark iris of his remaining eye looked black and hollow as the barrel of a gun. He pointed it at Roland.

“What blood have you shed?” Roland repeated. His voice was clear and cold. He still hunkered bare for all to see upon the blanket, but his erection had flagged.

“I have been to see the fat lady preacher,” Cuthbert said, “I use the term loosely - ‘lady,’ that is. She will be missed at church tomorrow.”

Roland sighed deeply and ran long fingered hands over his angular and weathered face. He turned to face his friend head on, sitting straight backed, crossed legged at the end of Alice's bed. “Tell me. For the first time in some while I have been loathe to chase our quarry, and now you, who have doubted that course all the way, have forced my hand.”

“I know. To do so did not please me. But, Roland, this town is Hambry’s echo. A trap was set here, and we sprung it: two women, once again - one to tempt you to distraction with her charms, and one to rile the others up against you. We have escaped the snare I tripped because I tripped it early, but the trap made a noise when it went off, and now the hunter’s dogs are coming.”

The back of Roland’s head dipped as he nodded. “Tell me everything.”

Cuthbert’s far off, hollow eye found Alice, and he held her gaze, uncertain. His story would be bloody, at the least, and Alice guessed from his reluctance that there would be more unpleasantness as well. 

“Speechify,” she mouthed at him, silently.

A fleeting smirk played at his lips, and Alice fancied that he might have blushed, but it was dark and might have been her imagination. His eye returned to Roland, and he nodded deeply, almost bow-like. “Alright,” he uttered, and began: “The woman Sylvia Pittston might have been an ordinary zealot once, dangerous in her charisma, dangling promises of hellfire and salvation before the desperate, slavering mob . . .” he paused to let them digest his fancy words. His smile floated like a ghost across his serious expression.

“When we were boys I feared that Cort might break you,” Roland said, “and you’d become a perfumed diplomat - pretty talk and pretty face and easy to despise. I thought this and pretended that I did not care. You say she was this ‘once?’”

Cuthbert smiled darkly. “I might have flourished in that role, say true. In fairer days I might have won my guns and been a diplomat as well and put my pretty face to use for Gilead. Perhaps that’s what I did tonight.” He grimaced, and Alice’s stomach clenched. “Once a zealot,” he continued, “but the man in black made her something more - or less, perhaps. He made her something else. 

“I knocked upon the shack behind the church, and she was glad to let me in. The woman was enormous. Pale, marbled flesh, and large dark eyes and beautiful dark hair. My lonely body felt her pull. 

“‘The one-eyed watchdog!’ quoth the bitch and chortled, ‘Does your master know you’re here?’

“‘Even the most loyal dog will wander when he’s left alone,’ quoth I to see what she would do.

“This pleased her very much. ‘I understand,’ she lied. She ushered me to sit and sat across from me, taking my hands as though she were a real cleric. She pressed my palms together and urged me to bow my head in prayer. I closed my eye, and there we sat together for some time. At last, she transferred both of my hands to only one of hers, which was large as well as meaty - she was at least as tall as you - and she brought the other up to touch the right side of my face. ‘You have suffered in his name,’ she told me.

“‘Yes,’ said I, for this is true.

“‘And still he kicks you when he sees a pleasing bitch. Even a scarred, old bitch like this one here pushes you from your place at his feet just because she has her hole in the right place.’ She poked me here,” he indicated his eyepatch, “which hurt, and I used that scrap of pain to call forth a real tear. She sighed as though I were a foolish child and said, ‘You have done wrong for him, and he has wronged you in return. He is the Antichrist. He has deceived you with his mockery of love. Only I can give you what you need: a cleansing and a woman’s touch.’

“I looked at her in real surprise. My mouth must have fallen open because now she touched my lips, then pushed her fingers deep inside to test if I would choke. She pulled them out and wiped them on my shirt.

“‘Your shirt is dirty. Take it off,’ she said, and so I did. ‘Remove your guns, for they are symbols of your misplaced loyalty to him.’ I took these off but laid them far away next to the door. I came to stand before her once again, and she said, ‘Good.’ Then she told me the most alarming thing of all: ‘You will not breach me with your tained body’ - not that; I’m getting there - ‘I would have taken on that sacrifice,’” his lip curled here, “‘to save you, but’ - this is the part - ‘I cannot risk the child he left. Not his, but the child of a great king. I am the Bride of God!’” 

Here, he paused again for Roland’s comment: “I do not like where this is going.”

“Shall I stop?”

“Don’t stop. I asked to hear.”

Cuthbert nodded. “I fell then to my knees in supplication to the Bride of God and made as though to service her, but she stopped me. ‘No!’ she cried, ‘This is for you. I cannot have you near my flesh of flesh. You, and only you, will come, and, when you do, his evil influence will be expelled. Rise now and face your savior.’

“I stood and faced her, and she spun me round to face the wall where the symbol of the Man Jesus hung upon His cross. The carving was ancient and amazing, perhaps something she had travelled with, but it had been defiled. At some point, the intricate idol had been painted, and her savior’s long and wavy hair had been colored yellow, his skin a pale almost white, and the wounds in his hands, feet, and side oozed out a ghastly red. He looked so like Alain I felt a little sick. I wondered if he would be sad, hanging there watching me behave like this, or if he reckoned that I got what I deserved for being party to his death. 

“‘Take out your sinful member for me,’ she requested. I undid my trousers and pushed them down about my hips. She pressed up close against me from behind and pillowed me against her giant breasts. She wrapped her slabs of arms around my chest and ordered me to touch myself. I did. She encouraged me to moan the demon out, so I made noise for her as I drew from myself an empty, carnal pleasure. She told me this was my last sin. She said her touch would cleanse me. Her huge hands rose and settled tight around my neck. She squeezed - enough to make my head feel light - enough to make the pleasure of sensation start to swallow up my mind. 

“Black holes opened in my vision as I stared into Alain’s carved face, locked in an expression of perpetual suffering and forgiveness. I knew she must be staring at him, too, for she thought that she was doing His work. I took my hands from my own flesh but kept them busy, and she did not seem to notice as she squeezed me slowly tighter. From my belt I drew my dagger, and I reached up high behind me. Against my back, her heart beat faster. She must have been excited by the thought of me about to scrabble uselessly at her vice grip on my neck.

“‘Shhh,’ she whispered, ‘God is ready to receive you. You will be cleansed. Come.’ I nearly did, from lack of air and her command - I mentioned her charisma - but I sent her instead. Her speech was her undoing, for it drew a target on her larynx, and I stabbed her in the throat. The titan loosed her grip on me and fell. She bled and could not speak. 

“I wiped her blood upon her robes and spoke - ‘It is you who were deceived. You bore a demon, not a god, and I have cast it out and sent you to . . . wherever you deserve.’ Her eyes still saw, and, when I rose, I placed a kiss upon forehead of the blonde Man Jesus on his cross intended for Alain. I dressed and composed myself. By the time my guns were fastened at my hips she lay there dead.”

Silence followed.

Sticky wet and leaking, horrified, Alice skirted Cuthbert’s gaze and focused determinedly on the back of Roland’s head, black hair barely discernible from shadow in the darkness. She could just make out the movement of his jaw when he spoke.

“You were not beneath his notice after all.”

Laughter burst from Cuthbert’s lips. “It seems not; although, I’m not in high regard.” 

“Alain would not be sad or vengeful. He admired your wit whether you used it to bring laughter or destruction. I heard him ask to see your smile as he died.”

Cuthbert’s lingering smile grew tight. He nodded and swallowed hard. “I will leave you now,” he said at length, “Again, I cry your pardon. Roland, I will meet you before dawn . . .” he paused, considering the time.

Roland made his calculation first. “Four hours.”

“I will take the mules from Kennerly and leave him coin before he wakes. Alice,” he acknowledged her again, then turned to leave the room.

“Cuthbert?” called Alice.

“Yar?” he turned around and leaned against the door again.

“Come see me here before you go.” 

Birdlike, he cocked his head and advanced slowly. As he drew near, Alice could smell what Roland could before - the lady preacher’s blood. Like Roland said, he was a killer, but she knew he also could be kind. The smell of blood reminded her she was alive. She was no longer ashamed by how aroused his story had made her - how aroused she still remained. Roland was still hers for four more hours, but she felt compelled to try for more; this was her only chance. 

“Your lonely body deserves better,” she said softly, “How long has it been since you lay with somebody who wanted you?”

He shrugged and smiled. “I have taken many lovers, and all of them have wanted me for one reason or other. Once or twice, the love between us has been true. It has been some time, but other lovers will appear. Don’t fret on my account that there was no one here for me.”

“There’s me.”

Cuthbert glanced at Roland, then looked back at her. “I don’t think so.”

Alice fought to keep the hurt out of her voice. “Because I am his lover, or because I am not pretty anymore?”

This made Cuthbert laugh. “Why, because you lie with him, of course. I may have, in my day, been vain, but I am in no place to judge these days.” He reached up to touch the leather patch hiding his right eye and smiled crookedly. She had noticed once or twice before how the right end of his mouth seemed to curve more subtly than the left and wondered whether he had always smiled like this or if it was a consequence of the damage to his face. “Shall I take it off this once, so we can be on equal footing? I am not pretty anymore, myself.”

Without waiting for her assent, he carefully untied the patch and removed it from his eye or what was left of it. In the darkness, little difference was apparent - a yawning shadow had replaced the blackness of the patch, and Alice knew this meant the wound was large and deep. Morbidly curious, she reached for him, but he backed away.

“Not yet.” He crossed around the bed and closed the shutters, then returned and lit the lamp she had not used since Roland had come to her bed. The light would reveal not only his scar but also hers, but Roland had made love to her in daylight, and she no longer cared.

Cuthbert sat on the edge of the bed with Alice in front of him and to his left and Roland behind him, silent, watching. His attention was turned toward the bedside table as he nursed the lamp to its full glow, so first she saw the dark gunbarrel hole in his left eye resolve into a warm, brown iris. Then he turned to face her fully. 

The skin between the bridge of his nose and where his right eye used to be remained, as did a finger’s width of eyebrow. Then, his brow and socket fell away into a sunken knot of scar tissue, which crawled in misshapen lumps along the jagged edges where a portion of his skull had cracked apart and spiderwebbed out toward his cheek, his hairline, and his ear - places where the skull was still intact. The outline of the patch was clear - what unmarred skin there was beneath the place it usually sat was sickly pale, and Alice realized that lines she had assumed were crow’s feet or the weathering of time and wind and sun were actually the radial effect of that horrific, hidden scar.

Alice gasped but did not draw away. Instead she rose up to her knees and reached for him, not caring the that blanket slipped down past her breasts. Earlier, she had wanted him to see her; now, she was absorbed in seeing him. He let her touch him, and his left eye tracked the course of her tentative hand as she gently explored the devastation on the right side of his face.

“It was unfair of me to laugh,” he said as she caressed the remains of his eye socket, tracing where his eyebrow used to be before dipping her finger into the divot where his eye belonged and divot the bullet had made in his skull, “The wound is nastier than people usually imagine, but the patch covers it well.”

“You are lucky to be alive.”

“Many times over.” He smirked and glanced at Roland.

Roland spoke: “Once there was a Captain who so loved his Lieutenant that he stopped the hand of death and plucked him from his grave.” He had remembered her words exactly. “In that story,” he continued, “I cut out a piece of my soul so that Rose Marie can sew it up inside you. Without it, your wounds would never heal because you were so surprised to be alive that part of your soul was trapped in the world after death.”

Cuthbert’s smirk transformed into a brighter, sweeter smile. “I was surprised, say true.”

“There are also fairies and a magic spring.”

“I must have slept through that.”

Roland smiled back and shook his head. “I would have wakened you.”

“I’ve heard that story since I was young,” Alice said, “the story of pure love. I used to think it was made up, that true love was impossible, but I know better now.”

“Do you?” Cuthbert asked, “Even if we are the basis for your story you have met us now. Is our love pure?”

“Purer than anything in Tull. You still love, and you are still together.”

“We are not lovers,” Roland pointed out.

“What, never?” Alice took her chance. She looked back and forth between them.

Cuthbert laughed softly, and Roland answered, “No, never.”

“You’ve never even kissed?” she asked.

“Not as lovers,” Roland said. He looked at the hole in Cuthbert’s face and his expression grew grim and haunted. Alice did not ask him to elaborate.

Instead, she asked, “Have you ever shared a woman?”

“No.” 

“Well,” smiled Cuthbert, “not with Roland.”

Roland blushed and looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked away.

Cuthbert continued, speaking softly, “Those sorts of things were frowned upon where we came from, and Roland is more traditional than I.”

Alice laughed. “They are frowned upon here, too, and everywhere I know. And I am frowned upon. And so are you, for being here at all. What does it matter now?”

Cuthbert only smiled and shrugged. “We are not lovers,” he said, echoing Roland’s remark, “I’ll leave you to it. You have fewer than four hours now.” He fastened his eyepatch back around his head, patted her hand, and rose.

“Stay,” said Roland, suddenly.

Cuthbert spun around to look at him.

“If it pleases you,” he added.

Cuthbert blinked at him. He opened his mouth and closed it again, and Alice felt a thrill at witnessing one of those apparently rare occasions when he was at a loss for words. Eventually, he asked, “Would it please you?”

“It would please Allie,” Roland said, “When we go, we leave her here in danger. I have been selfish. It pleases me to give her what she wants and to allow you a kind hand and pleasurable release before we travel on alone.”

“My lonely body deserves better?” Cuthbert smirked.

“Stay,” said Roland once again.

“Please,” Alice begged. Her body hungered for them both.

“Alright,” Cuthbert breathed. He did not move.

Slowly, Alice crawled to the edge of the bed and stood in front of him, naked in the lamplight. She looked up into his handsome, abused face and reached up to stroke his wound again. She could feel the bumps of scar tissue and the chasm of his empty eye socket behind his patch. Cautiously, she brought up her other hand and slid it back behind his neck, beckoning him down to kiss her. 

As she had expected, his kiss was softer and sweeter than Roland’s. She encouraged him to lean down over her as she lay back on the bed. He obliged, bracing his weight on his hands and continuing to kiss her with increasing fervor as she pulled him down on top of her. She moaned and bucked against him, irritated to find her bare hips rubbing against chafing denim and cold metal.

“You’re overdressed,” she complained, and he laughed and rolled away until he lay on his back between her naked body and where Roland sat regarding them. Roland’s expression was unreadable, but his arousal was apparent. 

Cuthbert noticed, too. “Carry on, then. As you were,” he told them, “I’ll catch up.” He crawled out from between them and made a show of leaning back against the pillows on the far side of the bed. Then he gestured that they should pick up from where they’d been before his interruption.

Alice tore her eyes from Cuthbert and looked back at Roland, whose cock had swelled further. He certainly had no qualms about his partner watching them. She turned so she was lying next to Cuthbert and spread her legs, moaning. Roland crawled on top of her again, and Cuthbert sat up on his elbows to get a better look as Roland plunged inside. Then, he leaned back again and undressed as they fucked.

Alice came quickly, but Roland pulled out before he came himself, his prick red and throbbing. He rolled over to press himself against Alice’s other side and looked expectantly at Cuthbert.

Naked and ready, the slighter man sprang gracefully into action, bracing himself over Alice to kiss her on the lips. His right hand and leg squeezed in between Alice and Roland so that he was touching them both, and his cock lined up with her wet and open entrance, but he did not thrust inside her. He kissed her for a moment on the lips before making his way down her chest, suckling at her nipples and caressing her breasts. Her hands came up to stroke his back and trace along the scars there. He had more than Roland.

Finally, he settled in between her legs and nipped her inner thigh. She shrieked. He stuck out his tongue and touched it to her nub, and she cried out again, her body spasming.

“Been a while, has it?” he asked.

Alice shook her head and bit her lip. Nobody had ever kissed or licked her there before, and, even though her own fingers were intimately familiar with that little bundle of nerves and pleasure, it had never occurred to her to ask for such a favor. But, now that she considered the idea, she found herself aching for it. If her own fingers felt so lovely spreading her body’s slick wetness across her swollen skin; how wonderful must it feel to have somebody’s hot, wet mouth perform the act? “Don’t stop,” she begged.

Cuthbert grinned and set his mouth against her. Alice shrieked a third time and then held her breath, trying to settle the involuntary movement of her hips. Once her body became accustomed to the unusual sensation she was able to truly enjoy it. His tongue, so warm and slick and wet, caressed her sensitive spot, and the supple strength of it - steady but softer than a finger - drove her to ecstasy. As her climax built inside her, he locked his mouth around the nub and sucked before gliding his tongue along her slippery groin again and dipping it into her pussy. When he returned his attention to the nub, she cried out and came, fisting a hand in his hair.

Cuthbert drew back a bit and smiled up at her. His lips and chin were slick, and his eye was sparkling. He ducked his head back down, and Alice screamed again and drove her heels into his back. He moaned.

When she had finished twitching and was breathing steadily again, she unclasped her legs, and he sat back on his knees. He started to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand but stopped himself and cocked his head at Roland. “Would you like to taste?” he asked.

Cautiously, Roland slid over to his friend and rose up to his knees as well. Kneeling, as when standing, Roland was taller than Cuthbert, and he leaned down, carefully, to kiss him. At first, the kiss was tentative and stilted, almost formal, the lightest brush of lips. This was how they must have kissed before - in ceremony or perhaps greeting or parting. Then Cuthbert changed the kiss. He opened his mouth and moved it against Roland’s, and he shifted a little to suck on Roland’s bottom lip. Roland responded, tentatively once again, and slid his tongue across Cuthbert’s top lip. Cuthbert met it with his own.

“Oh, fuck,” Alice murmured, “God.” It was the most arousing thing that she had ever seen and far outpaced the fantasy of their nonexistent coupling she had indulged in that first night. She reached down to touch herself and found that she was very wet - wetter than she usually got anymore, even when she longed to have a cock inside her. She had had more than two orgasms already, and her body was eager for more.

Apparently encouraged by her arousal, Roland pursued Cuthbert’s tongue back into his mouth, and Cuthbert moaned, then pulled back quickly, covering his mouth.

“Strange,” he said.

Roland laughed. “You are the one who has kissed men before,” he teased, but his voice sounded strained.

Cuthbert shrugged. “We are not lovers,” he repeated. He looked over at Alice, who was now sitting upright so that she could see them better. “What’s your pleasure?”

Her eyes dropped to his lap. “Will you hold your two cocks together?” she asked.

Cuthbert grimaced. He looked down at his own cock - only half hard now - then over at Roland’s - also flagging - then up at Roland’s face. “I don’t know . . .”

“Please,” she said, “I want to see how large they’d be inside me.”

Alice almost laughed to see both men become immediately erect again at this idea. They edged towards each other until the tips of their cocks touched, then Roland reached down and gathered both of their pricks together, softly stroking them to keep them hard. Cuthbert shivered and leaned forward, and, for a moment, Alice hoped that they might kiss again, but he rested his forehead on Roland’s shoulder instead.

“What say you, Alice?” he asked breathily. He turned his face in her direction, but she doubted he could see her - she was on his right, and his head was tilted downward where it rested on the junction of his old friend's neck.

What Cuthbert did not see was Alice driving four fingers deep inside herself. Roland’s eyes grew wide, and his mouth fell open. He squeezed his and Cuthbert’s cocks tighter, and Cuthbert made a little sound.

“Do you think that you can take us both?”asked Roland.

“Oh fuck, I want to try.”

Cuthbert raised his head and brought his hand up to the place where it had been, then he leaned back and pulled Roland down on top of him so that he could not help grinding down against his friend’s hard prick.

Cuthbert moaned more clearly now and reached for Alice, and Roland sat back on his knees again and straddled his friend’s legs so that she could crawl between them. With her back to Roland, she impaled herself on Cuthbert’s cock, and he took hold of her hips and thrust up hard. Unsurprisingly, he was not as large as Roland and certainly not as large as her own four fingers, but she felt her pussy clench pleasurably around his silky member anyway. He gasped and blinked repeatedly, struggling with control. How long had it been since he had bedded someone? At least as long as Roland, she assumed. That they did not bring each other pleasure on the lonely road boggled her mind, but their loss was her gain - in this small way they needed her so badly. 

Smiling with that knowledge, Alice leaned forward, smashing her heavy breasts against Cuthbert’s flat chest, and kissed him softly until he calmed down and his desperate need had passed. Then she sat up straight again and squeezed him from within. He moaned and thrust, and she rode him gently for a little while, letting her hands play along the scars on his chest. Remembering her earlier examination of his back, she realized that more than one of them went all the way through. She slowed her movements and ran her fingers around one on his right shoulder and one on his left side. 

“What was it like to be plucked from the grave?”

Cuthbert laughed breathily. “Surprising. I left a part of my soul in the world after death.”

Behind Alice, Roland snorted. 

“Lean forward,” Cuthbert whispered.

Alice felt her vaginal muscles clench around him and then flutter with anticipation of more. She leaned forward again to rest against his chest and tucked her nose into his neck, wrapping her arms around the top of his head. He returned the embrace, sliding his slender hands up and down her back and massaging her tailbone. Behind her, she felt Roland lean forward and lay a hand on her rump. He trailed a finger past her anus, down to the place where Cuthbert was already deep inside.

“Here?” he asked.

“Yes,” she breathed, “I want you.”

Roland’s long finger, larger than his friend’s, stroked the edges of her opening where it closed around his friend’s hard cock. She felt her muscles spasm, and Cuthbert moaned. 

“You have done this before?” - Roland’s voice again.

Alice shook her head violently. It would probably hurt at first, perhaps throughout, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. 

In the same moment, Cuthbert murmured, “Once or twice.”

“Like this?” Roland asked.

“Like this and in your place. So, at least twice.”

Alice lifted herself up on her elbows to see his sideways smile. Then she leaned down and kissed it. 

“You’ll want her to be very wet,” Cuthbert advised.

Alice grimaced. Aroused as she was, she never got as wet anymore as she had in her youth, and the extra slick from her mindblowing orgasm on Cuthbert’s tongue was already turning sticky. He moved smoothly enough inside her, but a second cock . . . she didn’t care. A request to shove it in her anyway was waiting on her tongue when Roland said, “I’m not going to lick her like you did.”

“I don’t expect you to,” Cuthbert replied, “Come up here, and I’ll lick you instead.”

Alice could hear Roland’s breath catch, and a new wave of arousal hit her hard. “I imagined this,” she admitted breathlessly, rising up on her arms again and grinding down on Cuthbert’s cock. 

He arched his back and pushed up into her then took a calming breath. “You are hardly the first,” he muttered cheekily. Then he turned his gaze to Roland, sat up on his elbows, and smirked. “Cherish the moment, gunslinger. I do not plan to offer this again.”

Alice could not see Roland’s face, but she felt him move behind her. Slowly, he crawled around until he knelt in front of her and to the side, his engorged member bobbing just in front of Cuthbert’s nose. Cuthbert looked at it and swallowed. He was flushed, his pupil blown out wide until his one brown eye was almost black. Their kiss may have been awkward, but he wanted this, she saw, and badly. Then he closed that captivating eye and licked the tip of Roland’s cock.

Roland gasped deeply. His hands flew up towards Cuthbert’s head, but he forced them down again. Alice looked into his face and realized, however much Cuthbert desired this, Roland wanted it more. Now that the possibility had been introduced, the tangled mix of love and inequality between them demanded consummation. For how many years had he secretly longed to demonstrate his power and his trust like this? Or had he never realized it before? Would this one moment’s act satisfy his forbidden desire, or would he ache for more?

“It’s alright,” Cuthbert whispered, his lips playing against Roland’s tip as he gazed up at him, eye large and dark, “I want you to. This once. Tonight. Come if you want; I doubt our Alice would be any less pleased.”

Roland’s eyes snapped to Alice’s face. Had he forgotten she was there? He took in her naked body, still impaled on Cuthbert’s rock hard cock (if anything, his arousal had increased). He stared at her breasts and the flush that she felt blooming on her chest and cheeks. She opened her mouth to encourage him to take his pleasure with his friend, but he spoke before he had a chance to hear her tempting words.

“No,” he said shortly, somewhat stiltedly, “That is too far. Say thankya. Make me wet and ready.”

“I doubt I even need to anymore,” Cuthbert joked, and Alice knew he was probably right, but he leaned to his right and swallowed Roland’s cock before he could object.

Alice and Roland moaned in tandem, and Alice clenched purposefully around Cuthbert’s cock. He made a noise low in his throat and took Roland deeper in. “He’s done this before,” Alice murmured out loud.

Roland grunted. “Say true, although not recently I think. We . . .”

“You are not lovers,” Alice interrupted smiling. “Fuck his mouth as if you were. He’ll take it sweetly ‘cause your love is true.”

Cuthbert hummed, and she reached down to offer more support behind his neck. Roland’s hands joined hers, and he began to thrust in gentle yet deep strokes against the back of his companion’s throat.

Alice whimpered and ground her nub against her lover’s pelvic bone. Leaning on her one free hand, she bent to nip his jaw below his ear. Cuthbert moaned and bucked into her eager pussy, and she moaned back and whispered in his ear, “Don’t come quite yet.”

Roland heard and pulled his cock from his friend’s mouth. Wordlessly, he circled back around them. Breathing harshly, Cuthbert laid down on his back, and Alice leaned down with him, kissing his neck softly. “That was beautiful,” she said.

“Yes,” Roland answered gruffly from behind her, “We are not lovers, and we won’t be after this, but I have no regrets. I thank you, Cuthbert, for your love and trust.”

“And I thank you for yours,” his friend replied. Alice felt his Adam’s apple bob against her lips. 

Then Roland shoved inside her, and the world exploded. There was pain in the stretch, but he stilled for a moment, and she adjusted quickly. She had stretched herself, and he was slicked, and she was very, very wet. Mostly, there was overwhelming pleasure. She was at capacity. Dimly, she felt Cuthbert throw his arms around her and felt Roland’s bony pelvis press hard into the cushion of her ass as he leaned over both of them and began to thrust in earnest. The stimulation caused Cuthbert to moan and thrust as well although his movements were restricted. Alice was pinned between them. She planted one hand on the bed and wrapped the other under Cuthbert’s neck and arched her back to give them the best angle for her pleasure as they rutted into her, against each other. 

The tension built unbearably inside her, and she came screaming, clamping down hard on their cocks and thrashing back and forth between their bodies. She saw stars. Before she had stopped panting, Cuthbert pulled her into something like a kiss, his open mouth breathing against hers, and he followed her in ecstacy, his tongue finally plunging into her mouth at the moment of a climax triggered by the spasms of her pleasure. As his cock began to soften, the extreme tightness of her over-stretched channel eased, and Roland thrust more wantonly, drawing shuddering gasps from both of his partners as his cock pounded into Alice’s sensitive passage and stroked along Cuthbert’s recovering member. He came and collapsed momentarily on top of them before pulling out and rolling to the side.

Cuthbert’s soft prick slid out when Roland’s did, and Alice rolled off to the other side, leaving Cuthbert, gasping, in the middle. Alice put out the lamp, and, for a moment, they breathed heavily in silence. Somewhere, still hundreds of miles away, the first fingers of dawn began to crawl across the East Country.


	5. Day Five

“I was already wounded many times, but the shot that took my eye knocked me down hard,” Cuthbert’s soft voice echoed in the waning chambers of the night, and Alice realized that he was going to answer her question after all. He was going to tell her about being plucked from the grave. 

He took a deep breath and continued: “I thought that that was it. But when I came to my senses I was still there in the battle. My brain hadn’t been blown out after all. I could hear Roland calling my name; we were the only ones left. He seemed to be below me, down the hill, so I rolled myself in that direction like a little child playing in the grass. There wasn’t any grass, though - only rocks and carnage. When I got close enough, Roland dragged me into a little hollow place behind a boulder, and I managed to sit up. I grinned at him and thought, ‘This is the end.’

“The Horn of Eld is strong, and it survived all that. Smiling, I drew it from my belt and made ready to blow a parting blast and make a final charge down towards the enemy. Then Roland stayed my hand.

“‘The day is lost,’ he said, ‘I will not lose you, too.’

“I don’t think I said anything. I think I just sat there and bled and gaped at him. It had always been the expectation that, when we came to our last stand, we would waste ourselves to the last man. Maybe he was amused by my silence, or maybe he was pleased with his decision not to send me to my death because he smiled at me for just a moment. Then he drew his knife from his belt and cut my dead eye from the cord that held it dangling from its socket. I held it in my hand and stared down at it as he wrapped up my wound.

“We hid among the bodies until dark, and then we crept among the shadows and the corpses up the hill and down the other side into the woods. I walked, but badly, and there are many things I don’t remember. He bathed me in the stream and dressed my wounds, but the country was full of our enemies, so we did not dare to rest, and I got worse instead of better. Roland got worse, too. His wounds were not as serious as mine, but he had to bear much of my weight and did not dare to sleep. One night, I begged him to sleep and promised I would sing softly through my watch. If I stopped singing, he would wake and check on me. He woke up in a terror when I coughed around a frog in my throat. Another night he left me alone propped up against a tree and went to hunt for food. I had my guns but hardly any shells and not much faith in my aim. I heard a noise and prayed I would not have to shoot, and here came this little girl. I talked to her until Roland came back. She looked under my bandage and told me that my eye was gone, but not to worry: I was still handsome. 

“We could kill her or we could trust her. We went with her to her home. Her mother was not pleased, but she gave us a little bread and sent us to sleep in her barn with the mutie cattle. Within her sight, I pretended to be less wounded than I was, and it nearly killed me. In the morning, Roland dragged me, semiconscious, to their well and tried to feed me water and clean my wounds. The mother saw us and took pity. She laid me in her daughter’s bed and took Roland into her own. The little girl slept curled into my side and said I was her sweetheart. We stayed there a long time. Once I could walk and function on my own, I practiced with my slingshot until I could shoot straight again, and then we left. They were kind people, and I hope they did not suffer later for it.”

“I don’t think they did,” said Alice, “They lived to tell the tale of the Captain and the Lieutenant.”

“Oh,” sighed Cuthbert, “Was that the story then?”

“Yes,” said Alice, “But with fairies.”

Cuthbert huffed a tired laugh and turned onto his side to face her. She rolled so he could spoon against her back as Roland had never done. To her surprise, he joined them, wrapping his taller form around his friend’s. How many chilly nights had they spent curled up like this? She drifted off to sleep.

A little over two hours later, Cuthbert woke them when he extricated himself from between their bodies. He kissed Alice on the lips, squeezed Roland’s hand, and dressed in darkness. Then he disappeared. Roland pulled Alice against him, and they slept a while longer.

When it was almost light, Roland rose and slowly dressed. Alice heard a noise outside and peeked cautiously through the shutters. 

“Is it Cuthbert?” Roland asked.

“Yar,” murmured Alice.

“He’s early.” Roland made no move to hurry. Still shirtless, he ambled into the other room to shave.

Alice kept looking out the window. Indeed, Cuthbert was there with their two mules, but he was not alone. He was talking to Nort.

Their conversation was so quiet that Alice could not even hear the distant murmur of their voices, but Cuthbert was facing her direction, and she could see his thin lips form the word, “NINETEEN.”

She covered her mouth.

As Nort spoke, Cuthbert’s expression remained kind but was otherwise unreadable. He showed no horror or surprise. 

At this point, Roland came back into the room and finished dressing. He kissed her tenderly and said goodbye.

“Farewell,” she said and meant it.

He doffed his hat and slipped silently down the stairs.

When Alice looked back out the window, Nort had raised his hand. Finger outstretched, he indicated seven points on Cuthbert’s body. Number five was his missing eye. Alice had only seen him naked once, but she remembered touching places one through four - they were all scars. Six was on his belly and seven was beside his sternum near his heart. Both of those places bore no scars; likely, they would have been - or would yet be - fatal wounds. Cuthbert nodded and smiled his kind smile. He spoke again, and, from the motion of his lips, Alice guessed his words included “thank” and “good.” Then he cupped Nort’s rotted face in his pretty, long fingered hand and held him steady, slender fingers curled back around his neck. He kept smiling and nodding, and he spoke once or twice again. Finally, he brought his other hand up where old Nort couldn’t see and blew his brains out.

Roland came out of the bar downstairs, and the two men rode away together.

Alice took a deep breath, wrapped herself in a dressing gown, ran down the stairs, and screamed with all her might.

The gunshot may have wakened up the town into shocked silence, but her scream drew its inhabitants like flies to rancid meat. She wailed about the murderers who tricked their way into her bed and begged Sheb to take her to church. Like a flash flood, the townsfolk swept her to their place of worship and called upon their minister to rise and give her sermon early: Alice the whore was at last ready to be purged. Finally, somebody tried her unlocked door and wailed at the sight. Alice crowded into the tiny shack but did not look at the dead woman. Instead, she turned around and plucked the carving of the Man Jesus from the wall and hid it in the pocket of her dressing gown; it was smaller than she had expected. The people of Tull were incensed, but their villains had departed, and their fervor died away into relief and gross bravado. Without their spiritual leader, they took their sabbath in the bar.

“I would have burned those fuckers, like I helped them burn the tall one’s girl in Mejis by the sea!” Sheb bragged.

“I know you would have, Sheb,” Alice replied, disgusted. She did not let him back into her bed. She’d seen the error of her ways, she said.


	6. Days Ahead

When the next stage came from Pricetown, Alice took it back the way it came. She had been there once before when she was almost young. Then, her beauty had only just begun to fade, but the angry red scar that crept lumpily across her forehead had stripped her of her self worth. As the man who gave it to her said, what good is a woman if she won’t bear young and isn’t nice to look at? That time, Alice had passed through Pricetown and kept going, determined not to stop until she reached the rotting edge of civilization. In the very next town she’d found it, and she’d made a nest of refuse and waited to rot out herself. On the way back, she didn’t bother to powder her scar; she had a new plan now.

Pricetown was bleak and dreary but it still had shops and industry, and its inhabitants, while neither kind nor friendly, were not outwardly hostile. She paid the stage driver and took a room at the inn and went to see the tailor. Two days later, she stripped off her faded sundress for the last time and regarded herself in the shopkeep’s foggy, highly oxidized mirror. The long black robe hid her still voluptuous form, washed out her pale skin, and emphasized her scar. She didn’t care. She paid with one of Roland’s gold coins.

“I can’t make change for this,” the tailor sneered.

Alice laughed. “I said as much when it was paid to me in Tull.”

This caught the tailor’s interest. “Which one paid it? The preacher one I’ve dressed you like?”

Alice shook her head. “Nar. He paid silver. And he wasn’t a preacher - but I’m going to be.”

The tailor laughed. “And what were you before?”

“Barmaid. But I have seen the light.” She drew out the carved crucifix and set it on the counter. “See this man? He’s the Man Jesus, but he’s someone else as well. He had two friends who loved him, but they led him to his death. See how he forgives them even as he suffers? When he died, he asked his friend to smile.”

“Didn’t the Man Jesus do that, too?” 

“Maybe he did. I’ve never read His Bible.”

This made the tailor laugh again. 

Alice continued, “This used to belong to a preacher lady in Tull. She taught my neighbors fire and brimstone and made them nastier than they had been before. The third man saw this carving, and he said that it had been defiled because someone had painted it. It’s true the paint makes it harder to see the details in the carving, but I like it the way it is because it made him remember his friend.”

“The third man . . . the one with the eyepatch?” asked the tailor.

Alice nodded. “Do you know who he is?”

“A hired gun if ever I saw one,” the tailor said, “I stayed quiet in my shop while they were here. They bought some mules and left.”

Alice shook her head. “A gunslinger, say true, but not a hired gun. He is the Lieutenant.”

“No!” The tailor ate up the gossip like it was sweet bread. “That’s just a fairy story.”

“It’s not. He told me how the Captain plucked him from the grave. The story travels far ahead of them; they had not heard of it before.”

“They played you for a fool, they did.”

Alice shook her head again. “I gave up all my fancies long ago. I gave up life and hope. But now I know that story is true, and I have a new purpose. Those men are dark and violent. Hard. But the love between them never died. I will travel back the way the story came and tell the people that will listen that they live. The Lieutenant told me they are harbingers of death, and maybe that is true for some. The Captain asked me if I thought the story had a happy end. Do you know the story?”

“I have heard it.”

“Good. Their story is as happy as it gets. The truth inside it gives me hope.”

The tailor regarded her in silence for a moment; then she laughed again. She turned around, picked up her yardstick, and used it to pull down a wide brimmed, plain black hat from a high shelf. “Take this, then, instead of change.”

Alice was reluctant. “I don’t need to hide my scar.” She almost had herself convinced.

“That’s neither here nor there,” the tailor said, “Do you think the stage runs all the way to Jericho Hill, if such a place even exists? Take it, pilgrim. There will be water only if God wills it.”

Alice took the hat and put it on.


End file.
